Patrick Frey demanded (no, seriously) that I “prominently” reply to one of his many, many, many, many Jeff Goldstein posts of the last several days. Why this is important to him I don’t really know, given that the subject matter (David Letterman’s Palin family jokes) is months old, and I participated in a nearly 630-post comment thread at the time, arguing my position from every conceivable angle, answering every question, countering every rebuttal.

But if it’s really that important to Patrick that I respond in a spanking new post, fine, here’t goes: there’s nothing here to debate.

Frey isn’t offering any arguments about the structure of language and how it works; instead, he seems to be arguing that certain speech should be unacceptable in the public sphere, and that he (and outraged conservatives like him) will tell us just what kinds of speech that is. Justifying Letterman’s right to make what I consider an easy (and lazy) joke for an audience he knew would be responsive is not the same as defending the joke, for reasons I shouldn’t have to explain to educated adults, much less a Los Angeles County Deputy District attorney (who may or may not be anti-semitic).

I disagree with his idea of what is “acceptable” and what is “responsible.” And so I disagree with his conclusions.

Too, I disagree that the joke was about Willow, or that it was a joke about rape, statutory or otherwise. The reasons for which I articulated in the original thread. I haven’t changed my position since I first posted on this, and nothing Frey writes in his post has anything much to do with intentionalism (other than that he insists that Letterman is really joking about someone he never mentions, and whose inclusion in the joke would have made it nonsensical), a linguistic stance he continues to misunderstand in the most egregious and frustrating of ways.

There. Glad I could help.

For those who are truly interested in what I think on the matter — that is, if you are curious about how an actual debate on the merits of my argument might work — I point you back to that post and its comments. There, all of Frey’s belated concerns with my position have already been addressed.

If I need to reargue them here, I’m more than happy to do so — though because I’ve already crafted answers, I might wind up just linking back to what I’ve already written, particularly if I don’t think the response needs further elaboration.

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update: This is interesting, by way of establishing patterns…

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update 2: Once again, Frey has posted a rebuttal piece to instruct the world on just how exactly the argument I present here (and presented back when this was an actual story) is “wrong”. Here’s how one commenter here sums up this newest argument:

Patterico’s main point of rebuttal seems to be that he doesn’t believe Letterman’s statements to the effect that he was talking about Bristol, not Willow.I can get that. I mean, he’s free to believe Letterman or not. But the (implied) notion that I’m wrong for believing Letterman is completely unsupported, and unsupportable.

My response, as it was at the time, is this: I can’t speak for everyone, but I argued that Letterman was talking about Bristol Palin a day before he issued his clarification.

Why? Because the joke made no sense any other way.

If Frey’s critique of my argument is that intentionalism fails because he doesn’t believe Letterman’s intent as stated after the fact (while for my part, I’m supposed to have uncritically accepted Letterman’s explanation), he’s incorrect: I established Letterman’s intent before he ever articulated it specifically, and I did so using all the tools available to interpreters: who his audience was, how these kinds of jokes get written, how the internal logic of the joke works, how the utterance fits into a particular context, what other jokes made about the Palin family were making the rounds (as both intertext and historical moment cues), etc.

My interpretation could have been wrong, sure. But Frey is arguing that Letterman’s actual intent was different from what he later said it was. Which naturally does nothing but support the argument for intentionalism: Frey is appealing to Letterman’s intent, as he reads it, in order to argue that Letterman lied about it after the fact — that he lied about what’d he’d intended, and how his intent ties him to a particular meaning.

And that is an intentionalist argument.

A survey of the available evidence, I feel, suggests Frey read both the situation and the utterance incorrectly. And so his interpretation, while legitimate, was no less wrong for the trouble.

And I made that quite clear at the time with respect to others who had readings similar to Frey’s. Which makes me wonder: why rehash all this now? Is it because, at the time of my original post on the subject, so many commenters, in a pique of outrage, couldn’t see the forest for the trees, and Frey was hoping to recapture some of that glorious “Jeff is so totally wrong” vibe?

I find that rather sad, frankly.

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more meta-commentary, from Tommy the Cat.